5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

1/11

CotiyriKhl = Mc I uhan ANSOH.IIOSLimited for theservices of:Marshall McLuhan/Kathryn Hutchon/Eric McLuhan, 1977

AcknowledgementsWe wi sh to thanl< the fol lowing authors and their representatives who have kindly permittedthe reproduction of copyrightmaterial: Noel B. Cerson: BecauseI Loved Him: The Lifeand Loves of Lillie Langtry William Morrow & Co., Inc. New York. 1971. MarshallMcLuhan: Inside on the Outside, or the Spaced-Out American. The Annenberg Schoolof Communications: journal of Communication and McLuhan Associates Ltd. 1976.Henry Reed: Naming of Parts in A Mapof Verona Jonathan CapeLtd. London. Kenneth R.Schneider: Autokind vs Manl

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

2/11

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

3/11

4TheCityasClassroom1 whatyou already know about yoursocietyToday s societies encompass an immense amount of information. Mostof this information has to be acquired by all the inhabitants of a particularsociety so that they can survive there.Yoursociety exists in a man-made e nv ironment, a hugewarehouse of information, avast resource to be mined free ofcharge.If you take time to think about your society s man-made environment,you w i l l probably find that you already know a great deal about it, notbecauseyou havestudied it in school, but justbecauseyouhavelived init

What have you already learned from your society about itsservicesand symbols?1 Here is a list of some of the things that you encounter in your society

every day. What do you already know about the language of:communication networks of radio and television; (How do youdistinguish between programs and commercials? How many technical broadcasting terms do you know?)streetsignsand trafficsignsand signals;transportation systems, their routes, fares; technical terms relatingt ocars,trains, subways, buses,trucks, airplanes;functions of buildings? (How do you distinguish, w i t hou t printedsigns,a hospital, a school, a college, an office building, a factory, achurch, a bank, a post office?)

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

4/11

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

5/11

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

6/11

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

7/11

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

8/11

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

9/11

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

10/11

5/23/2018 McLuhan 4. City as Classroom

11/11

64 CityasClassroom

Schafer,Murray. The Book of Noise Wellington, New Zealand: Price,Milburn & Co. Ltd., 1970. Distributed by Berandol Music Ltd., 11 St.JosephStreet, Toronto, Ontario.A study of sound pollution in the modern city and how we mightdefend ourselves.

Schumacher, E.F. Small Is Beautiful: [A Study of] Economics As IfPeople Mattered London: Abacus, 1974; Harper & Row, 1975.The speed-up in the electronic wodd is paradoxically restoring thedesire forsmallness and humanscale.

HowtoRelatetoYourOwn Time1 How to remain awareThe t itle of the previous chapter, "The City as Classroom," can be inverted to read "The Classroom as City." Since the advent of electronicmedia such as computers, enormous amounts of information are nowavailable in the classroom. We have already noted that in an age whenanswers are being discovered outside the classroom, questions belonginside the classroom; similarly, when an 'information explosion' is occurring outside the classroom, the study of structures of information or'pattern recognition' can go on inside the classroom.

All through this book, you havebeen studying the patterns and structures of our contemporary culture. Patterns and structures 'make sense'of things. Understanding structures enables us all to avoid that feeling ofhelplessness and frustration that makes us want to shout, "Stop theworldI want to get off "Now that you have come to the last chapter in this book, we aregoing to mention a few waysof maintaining yourawareness ofthe changing patterns in you r society.The strategies which we are going to point out should also help you tonotice new patterns in your society very quickly.